Nuweiba, Taba and the Coloured Canyon

A Sandstone Slot Canyon A Few Kilometres Long And In Places Barely Shoulder Wide, Banded In Red, Purple, Yellow And White, Reached Across The Sinai Interior From A Coast Of Bedouin Reed Camps Where Saudi Arabia Is Visible Across The Water And The Ferry Leaves For Jordan · Nuweiba, South Sinai

North of Dahab the Sinai coast empties out. Nuweiba is a long shallow bay with reed-and-palm camps along it where a room is a hut on the sand and dinner is whatever the kitchen cooked, Saudi Arabia is a line of mountains across twenty kilometres of water, and the ferry to Aqaba leaves from the port at the north end. The reason to come inland is the Coloured Canyon, a sandstone slot a few kilometres long and in places narrow enough to touch both walls, banded in red, purple, yellow and white where iron and manganese have stained the rock. It is an easy walk, mostly downhill, through something that looks engineered. Further north Taba sits on the Israeli border with the Fjord bay and Salah al-Din's island fortress offshore. This is the quiet end of Sinai: no strip, no airport of consequence, and Bedouin families running most of what there is. It is the one stretch of the Sinai coast that still looks roughly the way all of it did in the 1980s.

On the Gulf of Aqaba north of Dahab, with the Coloured Canyon inland towards Ain Khudra and Taba on the Israeli border 70 km further north, Nuweiba, South Sinai, Egypt

The Coloured Canyon is open desert reached by a track from the Nuweiba road, visited on a half-day trip that leaves in the morning; a 4x4 and a local Bedouin guide are the normal arrangement and may be required rather than optional, so book through a camp rather than driving out alone. IT IS CLOSED OR UNSAFE AFTER RAIN - a slot canyon floods and the water arrives from somewhere you cannot see, so ask about recent weather and accept a refusal. The coast camps run all year with no hours to speak of. Taba's Salah al-Din island has daylight hours and a small boat crossing. The Aqaba ferry's schedule and whether it carries foreign passengers have both changed repeatedly, so confirm before building a Jordan plan around it. Buses run the coast from Sharm and Dahab.

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